Monday, February 1, 2016

January was bleak, in more ways than one. Midway through the month, my family lost a brave,
smart woman to an aggressive cancer. Carol
was gone way too soon; she wasn’t even sixty.
And not long after she died, the whole world turned white, and the snow
pinned us in our houses.

So in February, I am ready to learn whatever it is I’m supposed to
learn from all this. I want the snow to
melt, making slow rivers on the sidewalks and the streets. And I want wisdom to seep into my mind, bit
by bit, so that I can make it through the rest of the winter, and whatever future
winters come my way.

Outside, as I write this, it’s warming, and I can hear the snow sliding
off the roof. On my desktop, there’s an
18th century painting: a lady in pale blue silk, with a long nose
and soft, mousy brown hair. Her name was
Elisabeth, and she looks calm and friendly as she sits for her portrait, as
relaxed as anyone could be under such a large, diaphanous hat.

For the painter, Adelaide Labille-Guiard, all that mattered then was
adding the right amount of green to the background, bringing out the pale tones
of the portrait. Neither of them knew
that seven years later, Elisabeth – who was sister to the king – would be beheaded
in the Reign of Terror, and Adelaide would be burning her canvasses of the
royal family, in order to save herself.

I look to Elisabeth for wisdom because her life and death are a closed
circle, 222 years in the past. Surely
when we see the entirety of a life, we can parse its meaning. Instead, I see a labyrinth of shifting fortunes,
love and loyalty, fear and pride. And
then there are larger weather systems that alter the paths of hundreds of
people, although each person falls as an individual.

Astrologers study closed circles all the time, mapping out the flow of
energy, correlating the shapes we see with other shapes from the past. But we are always feeling our way, because life
is an experiment that can never be replicated exactly. And the messages we read are always slightly
garbled, waiting for us to smooth them out and turn them into a reasonable probability.

Sometimes I resist this process of reading the chart, of making it
yield something practical. It often gives
useful information, but I always wonder what I’ve lost. What richer messages am I ignoring? What mysteries won’t yield to language?

Once I went to a workshop that presented the planets as literal gods, and
each birthchart showed the way we surrender to these gods. But most of us are not
willing to surrender, to give up our sense of autonomy, even when we sense we’re
surrounded by something looming and powerful.

January called to mind those hard and demanding gods. The month has been powerful, relentless, like
an avalanche of snow scouring a mountainside. And as we end the month, we’re stripped down
to our bones.

And this comes from Pluto, symbolic of the calloused hand of
destiny. It’s ironic that a dwarf planet
shows up when we have this feeling of being swamped by oversized fates which we
can’t control. But January was very Pluto-driven. First the sun conjuncted it, and then Mercury
slowed down to a crawl, and stationed right next to Pluto. As February begins, it’s still there, and when
Mercury eases away in a few days, Venus will move in and take its place.

How can one learn anything from these Pluto aspects? You’re just trying to survive. And yet this is when we learn things on the
deepest level, in our bones and teeth and hair. When we’re in survival mode, we’re trapped
in a room with our wildest and hungriest selves, and no formula will turn these
into docile pets. But at some point,
often years later, we honor the parts of ourselves that sacrificed everything,
that became unrecognizable, in order to show us the way out of that room.

About midway through February, Pluto
will stand alone once more. There will
be no planets conjuncting it, no henchmen to do its bidding. The sun, Mercury and Venus will all have moved
into Aquarius, and this is definitely a more hopeful and autonomous sign than
Capricorn. The focus will turn to friendship
and community. Suddenly, there will be
more room to move around, to try something new.

Aquarius allows objectivity, a certain distance between an experience and
its meaning. We don’t have to learn
everything through the body, through the hard and barren earth, through the
shovel and the rock. Knowledge will circulate more freely among people, and of
course, there will be plenty of clashes of opinion in February, because people never
agree on what’s true. And the further
you are from survival mode, the more truths there are.

And then on February 19, the sun will enter Pisces for the last, dreamy
month of winter. This is the month when
we all need our private escape routes, in order to imagine the green we’ve
forgotten. This is the month when people
leave their bodies without a whisper, hoping that there are other worlds with
flowers and soft breezes. But this is
also the time when we incubate whatever we want to be born in the spring.

For now, we’re buffeted by winter, and it’s all too real. It may be too soon to say what we’ve
learned. All we can do is hunker down and
study the face of time. It’s the devil
we know all too well, and the wisdom we always gain the hard way.